When the shark struck Brian Correiar’s sea kayak, the Monterey County diving instructor was nearing the end of a lovely paddle along the Monterey shoreline — an outing that twice took him past the popular lefthand point break at Lover’s Point.
Correiar’s ordeal was caught on tape by a couple walking the Monterey shoreline, and surfaced on the internet last weekend.
On March 18, as Correiar describes in a post on Diver.net, he launched his 14-foot sea kayak behind the breakwater just off Cannery Row. He’d spotted dolphins and young harbor seals as he stroked toward Shell Avenue, near the northwestern-most point of Monterey Peninsula.
“Suddenly, I heard a loud Bang as my kayak and I flew into the air,” he writes, and thus began the most harrowing 20 minutes of his life. Correiar landed in the drink a mere three feet from a large great white shark. “I could clearly see its 2-inch teeth and its black eye that looked lifeless.”
While yelling “No, God no!” Correiar’s mind flashed with survival tactics: Don’t let your legs hang down. Don’t act like a panicked seal. Keep your eyes on the shark. He began kicking toward the nearest shore, a stretch adjacent to Monterey Bay Inn.
Bite marks from Correiar’s kayak. Photo: National Geographic
“It was like a horror movie,” he told National Geographic.
As the video shows, the shark dragged the kayak around for a bit. “The shark was using my boat as a chew toy.” Later, bite marks revealed that the fish’s mouth clamped around the full diameter of the boat. While waving with one arm to a nearby sailboat, Correiar pulled out a marine rescue GPS and radioed the Coast Guard.
Though he was swimming away from the shark, “It started pushing the boat towards me and then left the boat and headed for me,” he writes. “Suddenly it dove. I put my face in the water to see if it was under me, but I couldn’t see anything.”
Twenty minutes after the initial hit to the kayak, with his extremities going numb — he was wearing a 3mm wetsuit but had forgotten booties — the small sailboat came to his aid. But the boat had no ladder and Correiar was unable to board the vessel.
“I could not get up into the boat or stand up on their motor. I asked them to call 911 and ask for coast guard assistance,” he writes, so he clung to the boat’s outboard motor. Five minutes later, a 29-foot Coast Guard vessel arrived, scooped him from the drink and took him ashore.
As he points out, the attack runs counter to a common perception: that great whites strike out of curiosity and back off upon discovering their target was not a pinniped. “I had always thought that great whites hit a target to test it and then backed off. This was a prolonged attack on the surface.”
“I suspect that I just joined a very small club – one I never wanted to join!” he writes.
Nevertheless, Correiar told reporters that he’ll kayak again, and that the incident only highlights the responsibility that falls on ocean-goers.
“People need to be aware that the ocean is a wilderness area, this naturally includes large predators,” he said. “People need to be prepared for the environmental conditions and self-rescue if needed. I had exposure equipment, signaling devices, and rescue classes.”
